Large scale processing of cattle and other slaughtered animal carcasses generally takes place automatically. Carcasses are suspended from a conveyor by their hind legs and are transported for processing along a prescribed path. Adjacent the path are a number of processing stations that perform operations such as: opening the breast and abdomen, cleaving, vent-cutting, neck-cutting, leaf-fat stripping and evisceration. Because, among other reasons, not all operations take the same amount of time and in order to have the conveyor advance at a constant speed, the plant could decide to situate a plurality of similar processing stations parallel to the transporting direction of the conveyor.
In practice, the separation between carcasses suspended from a conveyor varies for a number of reasons. For instance, wear of the conveyor, varying intervals in the (partially manual) hooking of the carcasses to the conveyor, varying size of the carcass (for larger animals especially), etc. are some of the factors that change the spacing between carcasses. This makes impossible, or at least inefficient, the use of multiple parallel processing stations that displace in a fixed mutual orientation along a guide.
Notwithstanding such problems, a British patent application, GB 2 095 973, describes a device for processing poultry provided with a guide running parallel to a conveyor and along which at least one tool displaces synchronously with the poultry carcasses in an active position. The tool can be moved back to a starting position. A device is also described with a plurality of tools displaceable along the guide, where the tools are assembled on a common carriage.
A Netherlands publication, NL 9 001 591, describes apparatus for exerting a tensile force on the halves of a slaughtered animal in order to improve the meat quality. The stretching apparatus travels along a track in the transport direction of a slaughterhouse line. But there is no reference to a parallel arrangement of multiple such stretching apparatuses.
Several U.S. patents reveal similar systems. For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 4,146,945 describes a device for cleaving carcasses. A cleaving saw moves along a frame to process the carcass during transport. While a number of saws may operate in parallel, plant workers cannot adjust the interval between the saws. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 3,990,126 describes a device for removing pig's heads. Hooks separated by a fixed, common distance line up to the carcasses and move more or less parallel to the direction of movement of the carcasses. A hook snags the pig's head, after which the pig conveyor moves away from the hook, causing the head to separate.
Collectively, none of the above approaches provide for parallel, but flexible, processing of the carcasses. In other words, in order to make most efficient use of plant processing space, it would be desirable to provide mechanisms and methods for parallel processing where the processors at least somewhat independently move relative to one another as they also move alongside the carcass conveyor.